Chapter 7
“Look in the Calendar and bring me word.”
Julius Caesar
One of the main gripes voiced about shifting to a social-media-centric way of promotion is the amount of hours we see each of the various platforms eating into our precious time. That’s why flexible scheduling is so important. I say “flexible” because there’s only so much content, or foundation tweets as I call them, that you can use at a later date without things changing and removing its value.
Creating content that is particularly relevant to your followers at that very moment has disproportionately high benefits. Being on-trend not only gives you structure (relieving you from the “what should I write about next?” dilemma) but also increases the likelihood that people will interact with your content, that it will be retweeted, and that it will warrant an eventual call to action in terms of revenue possibilities.
When I first started building my personal brand on Twitter, I did so in a “fly by the seat of my pants,” ad-hoc fashion. As my following started to substantially grow, however, it became more and more difficult to manage the time and flow of my content. I realized there had to be a more efficient way of managing my content stream, so I looked to traditional methods of planning to build my formula on.
My mind wandered back to my days at News International in England, where our editorial calendars were our bibles, and a “Eureka!” moment occurred. Surely I could adopt the same principles of content management and transfer them to my social media platforms to bring much needed structure to my content stream.
I realized that the goal of reflecting what is current and relevant to my audience was something of an art form, but by linking to trusted curation sources (which I explain later in this chapter), you can master the art of great Twitter content and set it down in calendar form.
This realization came to me prior to defining the four types of tweets, which I introduced in Chapter 5. In fact, putting together my Twitter-centered editorial calendar — or my Twittertorial calendar as I now like to call it — helped me realize how different types of tweets could work in synergy to effectively promote a brand message.
Planning your Twittertorial calendar in advance takes courage. To begin with, it can feel a little like stumbling around in the dark. You’re not entirely sure what you can reach out and grab onto for support along the way, and the ground below can seem unsteady. Again, this is where the power of your personal brand statement will play a huge part in helping you plot your course.
Make no mistake, clever curation is indeed an art form that starts with a clear understanding of your personal brand statement, which I introduced in Chapter 3. You need to fully comprehend all it stands for and all that you, as a personal brand, want to achieve from its message. It’s a case of mentally dissecting your brand into clearly definable and highly searchable keywords and phrases that will lay the foundation for your curation framework.
Using my @grattongirl brand as an example, my personal brand statement reads, “I delight in helping others create and unleash their personal brand on Twitter.”
I can break the keywords down to “help,” “create,” and “branding” and then build on these words to find searchable keyword alternatives such as:
I can then break my statement down into searchable phrases such as “I delight in helping others create and unleash their personal brand on Twitter”:
Or “I delight in helping others create and unleash their personal brand on Twitter”:
Or “I delight in helping others create and unleash their personal brand on Twitter”:
And there are dozens more combinations I can draw on to find the most brand-relevant content for my followers.
Next, I use my keywords and phrases to find fresh and relevant content on my search engine sites and other great curation resources such as StumbleUpon (see Figure 7-1). This content will make up my Inform tweets, which I introduced in Chapter 5.
Figure 7-1
StumbleUpon is a great curation tool for locating new content based on your keywords.
Be sure to check the dates of any sites you search for on Google using its Search Tools option in the bottom left of the Google website to make sure they contain current information (see Figure 7-2). Be sure to also check the dates of any content found on StumbleUpon to keep your links as up to date as possible.
Figure 7-2
Google’s Search Tools feature makes it easy to customize your search and locate the latest content to keep your tweets fresh and relevant.
Once you’ve curated a great range of content that fits well with your personal brand, save a brief summary of each proposed tweet with a link to the URL where the content can be found. I place mine in a separate folder on my computer so I know where to easily find them. My folder is labeled Curation and is broken into subfolders determined by my keywords to make my curated content easier to locate when I put together my calendar (see Figure 7-3).
Figure 7-3
Organize your curation in a main folder containing sub-folders based on your personal brand keyword findings.
Having curated a great range of content for your brand from other sources on the web, the next step is to compile links to every article, post, infographic, quote, and other related item that is either written by or attributed directly to you. I call these your brand anchors, as they are fundamentally routed in brand “you.”
Once you’ve put together your brand anchors, it’s time to get creative with your proposed tweets to draw your audience to them. For example, the links to my books are great brand anchors and I have found a variety of ways to direct my followers to their online order pages using creative tweeting, as shown below in Figures 7-4.
Figure 7-4
Some example brand anchor tweets, enticing followers to check out (and with any luck purchase) this book.
All good curators draw on key events throughout the year to source new content that best showcases their brand message. Start by looking at future events that have a personal connection to brand “you.” A florist, for example, would pay particular attention to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and mark them as key occasions in his or her Twittertorial calendar. A technology consultant would probably include SXSW and CeBIT in his or her lists. As you create your list, make sure that every event has a date associated with it for your calendar.
Order the list by date, and begin by focusing on the events occurring in the next three months. Also pay particular attention to the biggest events in your year ahead and those where you are speaking or contributing in some way. In fact, try to find as many ways of associating your brand with these events to turn them from curated links to brand anchors that showcase brand “you”!
Don’t be afraid to let your imagination run away in this process. Think of different takes on how you present your content. For example, if you’re planning to cover a local industry event, why not start a tweetup among the attendees, with a specific hashtag (I explain more about this in Chapter 10) to bring a sense of community to both the event and to your followers, who can then also participate via your united tweets. A tweetup, as I introduced in Chapter 6, is basically a means of forming a Twitter group at a get-together, which is then tweeted out to each of the attendee’s followers. It’s a great way of bringing like-minded tweeters together and building on your following at the same time. You can use your Twittertorial calendar to both initiate and promote the tweetup and, of course, to follow up on it after the event.
If you’re aware that relevant industry data is going to be published, plan ahead and have a template ready to create a unique infographic of it, which you can tweet to your followers.
If you’re aware that a competitor is about to announce a new product or service, don’t be afraid to steal its limelight by tweeting something to distract attention from it, whether it be a new report that leads opinion in a different direction or news of something equally big from your side of the trenches. For example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Microsoft allegedly tried to generate buzz by revealing the new Windows 8 logo on the same day that Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion was announced.
The following is an exaggerated example list of what you might now have to work with based on a huge amount of personal interests. Not everyone will have a range as wide as this and, as previously mentioned, it’s good to hone your list into a personal, brand-specific niche. But I hope it will give you an idea of how your list could look at this stage:
So now you have all the pieces to your puzzle. But bear in mind that the list itself is far from definitive. The key now is to put its items together in a way that paints a clear picture of your brand.
You can use your list of curated content to create your foundation tweets. These are the tweets that stay in your calendar and can be planned and positioned well in advance.
You can also use your keywords and phrases to add suggestion tweets to the calendar. These are tweets that need to contain freshly curated content to keep them current.
Whatever month you choose as the first month to start tweeting from your Twittertorial calendar is Month 1. Let’s say you’re starting to plan your Twittertorial calendar in September to begin using in October. In this case, October is Month 1, November is Month 2 and so on. You’ll need to incorporate your four types of tweets in your calendar’s construction, so the first day of Month 1 might look like the one in Figure 7-5.
Figure 7-5
An example of how the foundation tweets in a Twittertorial calendar might look.
Day 1 shows my brand anchor tweets for the day in blue. These are also foundation tweets, accessible from my folders and personal links and are unlikely to need amending. The other tweets are suggestion tweets that point the way for me to curate great content for the day.
Notice that I don’t include any Thank or Engage tweet notifications. These are necessary but reactionary tweets that can occur at different times each day and are wholly dependent on follower behavior and content, making calendar placement impossible.
Also notice that, at this stage, I haven’t allocated specific times for the tweets to go out but have merely planned the content I want to provide for my followers. I explain more about why this is the case in the next two chapters.
What you need to do now is to turn your Twittertorial calendar into your own unique brand show. So, what are you waiting for?
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